As the summer comes to an end with the Labor Day Weekend, many of our minds are turning back to the workplace, and therefore now is a perfect time to think about its future. In years to come, will we be returning to a very different environment? What tools might we be using and what impact will automation have on our professional lives? As always, it’s not hard to find those with a negative view. It seems that hardly a day goes by without an article saying that Artificial Intelligence and automation will take away jobs. Setting aside that hyperbole, let’s look at the reality behind the headlines.

Looking Back: The Industrial Revolution

It’s impossible to look at the future of work without putting our current working conditions in context. The industrial revolution was arguably the biggest change in working lives in human history. For the first time, durable goods became affordable, a burgeoning middle class evolved, and eventually legislation cut working hours, mandated education, and advances in transportation forever changed our lives. Of course, I am summarizing changes over a period form the 1760s until the 1900s. However, the theme is clear: automation in manufacturing led to better, safer and cheaper goods, and to safer workplaces and better qualities of life.
Of course, change is always controversial. Anti-technology movements and sometimes violent protest against automation existed in manufacturing, the Luddite movement in 19th century England being the most commonly known. However, today it is impossible to think of returning to pre-industrial automation where children worked in dangerous conditions and adults clocked 12 hour long shifts doing mind-numbing and often back-breaking work.
Today, automation in manufacturing seems to have reached its peak. But what about in the service sector? Yes, we’ve undergone changes in the service sector. For many of us, we never worked in a world where we didn’t have a computer on our desk. First generation automation and the advent of the PC have done away with a certain number of repetitive tasks.

The Future: Increasing Performance with Automation

A few months ago, I asked a friend who is an analyst on Wall Street what repetitive work he does that could be automated. He told me he spends 20 hours per week crunching numbers and writing reports that are 80% data driven. He often works late and on weekends to keep up with this work. And yet it is possible to automate the generation of the first drafts of these reports so that they are written with the click of a mouse. This would give my friend back his nights and weekends and increase his capacity. Some businesses have already automated this processes, but others are dragging their feet.
Advice and customer interaction is the next step in automation. To be clear, I don’t mean using tech to stop human interaction, I mean using tech to increase performance. When a customer calls a call center or goes into a store to buy a product or get advice, the level of service they get depends on whom they speak with and the complexity of their situation. Companies today sell more products than ever before, and demanding that their employees remember all the products and all the customer data is frankly impossible. Here, automation and expert systems could help employees perform better and better the customer experience. Companies can run AI expert systems in call centers or on tables at the point of customer service. These systems can be programmed with the company’s comprehensive levels of best practices so that the customer always get the best possible service.
So what do these two specific scenarios tell us about the future of work? In the future, no knowledge worker should undertake a repetitive task. Instead, we will show an expert system how to do the task and program it with our expertise. The programming will be done through a simple interface so that “citizen developers” can program apps with their best practices. We will no longer write data-driven content, we will use enterprise language generation software to write the first draft of these reports in multiple languages, then we will add creative analysis or non-data driven comments. The future of work will be the automation of knowledge work, which, like the industrial revolution before it, will better the quality of our professional lives, free up our time, and improve the quality of the outputs. Who knows: in years to come, after summer vacation, we may not return to quite as large a pile of work!

Arden Manning

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